[Openinteract-dev] has_a, links_to, and children tables

[Andrew H. <hur...@ll...>]

Hello there,
   Finally back to work with OpenInteract, I've got a question.  I'm 
working on a document management system, and the documents will be 
broken up into pages and paragraphs.  The general idea is:

Document  1->N  DocumentPage  1->N  DocumentParagraph.

Relevant table structure:
Document has a document_id
DocumentPage has a document_page_id, and document_id
DocumentParagraph has a document_paragraph_id and a document_page_id

What I would like to do, is represent this link somehow in the 
spops.perl, but I'm not exactly sure how.  I want to be able to be 
using a document object, and get the list of documentPage objects 
associated with it by just doing:
   @doc_pages = @{ $document->document_pages };

I've looked into has_a, and links_to, but they don't seem to do 
exactly what I need.  Specifically it looks as if I need to keep the 
id of the DocumentPage object that is 'had' by the Document object in 
the Document table.  Is there a way to specify 'linked_by' 
relationships?

In writing this I've realized that this could be a huge performance 
hit for big documents with lots of pages and paragraphs (the one that 
I'm designing this for has about 99 pages in Word).  I might just 
have to write a few functions to fetch this information manually and 
only set it if needed...

Any pointers?

Thanks.
-Andrew